After the war the Italian press
attacked Hudal for the help he had given to Nazis, and Vatican pressure finally
forced Hudal to retire in 1953. In his embittered retirement he wrote Römische Tagebücher: Lebensbeichte eines
alten Bischofs (Roman Dairy: The Life Confessions of an Old Bishop). In the
chapter “Arme Brüder,” from which this selection is taken, Hudal recounted
stories of people in trouble who came to him for help. There is no particular
reason to doubt the veracity of these stories, but Hudal’s rhetorical purpose
is to show himself a sympathetic person whom people seek out for help because
they know he is the type of human being who will help. Thereby Hudal seeks to
justify the help he gave to Nazi war criminals to enable them to escape
justice.

Hudal is careful to conceal
particulars of Canon N. We may assume he was from a German-speaking country.
Hudal wrote his book in the 1950s. Canon N. seems to have been ordained around
1900. The case of N. had been decided long ago, and N. had lived his double life
for twenty years, so the story seems to belong to the first third of the
twentieth century.

When the Vatican laicized N., it
still held him to the requirement of celibacy. In the 1950s Rev. Gerald
Fitzgerald, founder of the Servants of the Paraclete, criticized this policy,
and it waschanged, so that now priests
and religious who are returned to the lay state also receive permission to
marry. However Hudal does not seem to realize that this permission would be
irrelevant to Canon N., whose sexual desires were exclusively homosexual.

Also note
the assumption of the existence of hereditary mental problems. This assumption
is based on a biological determinism that was popular in many circles in the
first half of the twentieth century (and later), but was somewhat contaminated
by its use by the Nazis. The Church was suspicious of this concept for many
reasons. Note also the general doubts that Hudal has about celibacy, although
his sympathy for a national church and fear that celibacy isolates the priest
from the blood of the nation has somewhat of a Nazi tinge.

Canon N.

I encountered a totally different
type of human being in the poor brother of a foundation of canons, who because
of repeated misconduct (179) was declared forfeit of all clerical rights by the
Holy Office, the highest moral authority of the Roman Church, without being
freed from the duties of this status in regard to celibacy. Years had passed
since this decision. He made himself sick to death about it. He was sent from
one monastery to another. Everywhere the first question of his brothers was,
Why as a cleric doesn’t he say mass? Marked with the sign of Cain, he went from
place to place, fleeing a world that had no love or kind word for him. On the
contrary, as soon as they learned of his past and of his errors, they judged
and damned him again. Truly a poor brother!

The tragedy of this hard fate led
me to speak up for a revision of the whole ecclesiastical process of handling
cases and especially the judgment at the highest level. My suggestion was to
free him from all priestly activities and duties and to prepare for him the way
to a reasonable middle-class occupation.

I had no success, although this
pitiable priestly penitent acknowledged his guilt with a flood of tears and a
reasonable program of life as a layman would perhaps have saved him. This
unhappy man, whose final fate deeply moved me for years and always came to the
surface of my memory, belonged to a certain foundation of canons, whose
essential purpose had become difficult in our world with its urgent social
questions. They occupied themselves with the care of souls like many other old
orders, which had become untrue to their original purpose for which they were
founded, because secular priests are in the first place called to pastoral
work. In any case these half-cloistered, half-secular minded men, lived a life
unperturbed by earthly cares, with which fathers of families and single people
were oppressed in the factories of industrial cities.

Everything from getting out of bed
to the obligatory pious exercises that broke the monotony of life is ordered
according to a good rule. These men could fall into heaven from this vale of
tears, if only from time to time the all-too-human did not disturb their rest.
Like conservators in a museum of archeology they watched over immense art
treasures of past centuries. The Roman Curia only rarely intervened with
reforms, when for example offenses became too great or too well-known. The
Curia did not easily discard outdated monastic forms, out of tender
consideration for the usually canonized founders and dragged through the
centuries outlived, rotten things, like an old woman who separate herself from
the household junk of her youth. Only secular history from time to time
mercilessly intervenes with its destructive and constructive power and destroys
what competent authorities would neither preserve nor modernize.

The family history of this poor
brother was strange enough. Canon N. came from a decayed family. The father was
disposed to melancholy and sensuality. The parents’ marriage broke up early on,
because, among other things, the mother, advised by a pious confessor, from
fear of danger to life in the case of a third birth, denied or at least
discouraged the marital act so that her husband refrained from it, only soon to
have an affair with an unmarried person, with whom he, over 60 years old,
fathered children who embraced him with warm love and graced the evening of his
life. He died, without being able to be reconciled to his first wife because a
second, purely-civilly contracted marriage ruled out any possibility of
reconstructing the life of his first family that had ended in divorce.